The Quality Blog

Just a quick not to share some recent experience. I was at several clients over the last two months, each with an identical issue. These clients are in different industries, aerospace, automotive, and pharmaceuticals. The issue was legacy, or lack thereof. Each company has been wildly successful over the years, (two are over 100 years old) but when it came to Product Development, a great deal of waste was present due to relearning that which has already been learned. This is partly their customer’s fault, by not accepting years of data on identical product, but nonetheless, testing and making prototypes to test at reliability and confidence levels requiring 6 or more samples, is very expensive and time consuming.

My recommendation to them was to develop a legacy based product development system. This means that all that we already know is easily retrievable and used to reduce overall time in PD. The risk is low and the confidence in these designs must be high with a good deal of history. It may be that the concept of confidence is misunderstood. The more I see, experience, etc… the more confident I am. Statistical confidence without engineering judgment and legacy will drive unnecessary testing and longer PD to market.

Are FMEA’s actually proprietary. I have been hearing this over and over again far too many times. The purpose of the FMEA is to collaborate on risks, not hide behind the proprietary statement. It is common if you do not want someone to see what is on the FMEA, that we call it proprietary. I would ask a simple question, is it really or are you bad at creating them. I think it is an excuse not to show how poor they are performed….

An excellent comment on the blog made me think of an underpass on a Detroit highway. Driving down the road I found that  road was flooded. Being the weird individual that I am and having read a comment about the discussion being the most important thing in an FMEA, I logically saw an analogy of the flood to the FMEA process.

Water will flow unobstructed based on Gravity. Water will flow out in quite a few directions simultaneously. As the water spreads it covers a lot of area. Teams work in the same way. All kinds of info and discussions can take place spreading out, thinking of every possible thing that can go wrong.

That is the problem, all the discussion is like water spreading out in all directions. We are not getting it where we need it. FMEA is like plumbing. FMEA channels the water like in irrigation to the crops that need it most, It is like plumbing in that there may be differing directions that I want the water to flow, not everywhere. Too many times teams sit down with a blank form and go for it and end in despair due to hour long discussions only to end with, but that wont  happen because we did this thing or followed this practice. How frustrating. FMEA is very effective, but the planning for the experience is every bit as important as its’ outcome.

I am at Ford Today, working on all the assembly plant operations for three new or significantly changed product lines. Ford has always been in the forefront of FMEA use and it is still true today. The techniques we are using here would not necessarily be recognized by the vast majority of FMEA users out there. In fact, the fmea’s being developed for complete assembly plants are quite manageable in size, not what you would expect from past line by line development activity. Why?????

We have leaned out the FMEA process by seperating the knowns as legacy and focus only on the change bothe incidental and intentional. For those of you in the know Incidental and Intentional Change are the primary things that Toyota looks as as well in DRBFM (Design Review Based on Failure Modes).

By seperating what is known and turned into standard work, The Lean FMEA technique only looks at the:

• New Operations
• Changes to Operations
• Past Failures
• Incidental change due to Noise Factors like environment or operator preferences.

Process assesmbly FMEA is now quick and quite effective as the ratio of actions to line items is much greater. This is due to more emphasis, focus and attention applied to the subset of what is probable (changes) and discounting the possibles where no change is likely to drive failure where it did not exist before.

In the future Ford will probably adopt Lean FMEA for all assembly in Vehicle Operations, and we will be there to continue the relentless never ending task of making FMEA and other quality tools more efficient and effective.

APQP or Advanced Product Quality Planning is a simplified version of a product development process that has been made available to the supply chain of the automotive OEMs. After close inspection, it becomes apparent that the automotive companies wished to provide a PD process to the supply chain that links the supply chain activities to the Original Equipment Manufacturer’s Product Development Process. The APQP process has a bad reputation in that many people do the tools but not in a linked fashion. In other word as a checklist for conformance. The true practioner will utilize each tool that makes sense for the application of what is being done.

Tools should be selected based on :

New Content (Design or Process)

Past Failure

New Environments

The tools selected become part of a Product Assurance plan, or what is called in APQP the Product Quality Plan. This plan is different for differing applications. I will comment on the details of the plan in my next blog entry.

Just returned to North America from China and India. I was teaching APQP and PPAP to several enthusiastic groups in both China and India. With emerging markets expanding at an exponential rate, the need for supply chain management and development is very strong. Suppliers make up to 70% of the value in most big products produced in these regions. The supply chain is also as diverse as he cultures that I have visited there. Some suppliers are transplants form Europe or North America and are as sophisticated as their inspirations in NA and the EU, while others are just getting started or have been suppliers for a very long time but without the extra expectations of the change management process of APQP. I must say that the groups that I visited were very enthusiastic and quite interested in the possible benefits of Quality Planning. I was very explicit about the danger of the checklist mentality and the temptation to just complete forms and not get the true benefits of FMEA, Special Characteristics and Collaboration. This message is key to ensuring that intelligent supply chain development is the outcome instead of the documentation exercise so often incorrectly depicted as what APQP is.

Just a note to my new friends in China and India, Wow, I had a great time, thanks for the hospitality and the great interchange, questions, and learning experience. I will always remember my trip and your friendliness.

Lee

In Beijing this week teaching 40 or so engineers and suppliers development people in APQP.The tools used in APQP such as FMEA and Design for Assembly were of great interest. I was very pleased at the level of intensity that was demonstrated by the participants. (trying not to fall asleep) But seriously, these tools which have been introduced are not well understood even though many examples exist of their use. I suspect they are filling in the form without getting much value from the tool (FMEA) What is really rewarding to me is when they “get it” and they begin to listen and ask questions and you can see that they will now be using the FMEA as it was intended – to prevent failure and improve controls.